


Old Logic

by story_monger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt, Episode: s10e14 The Executioner's Song, Gen, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-03-13 16:42:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3388880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Find the creatures like you and make them your group, your tribe, your family. The old logic states to seek the heat of a known living thing, to surround it, to let them surround you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Logic

**i.**

It’s probably to do with the fact that they’re human. Sam has spent days in the Impala’s passenger seat thinking about this, about how humans are tied to what evolutionary biology spit out after a few million years of wandering grasslands in Africa. React to the red of blood. Fear the dark. Look at anything that moves; it’s going to kill you or you might be able to eat it. Find the creatures like you and make them your group, your tribe, your family. Learn to tell them the things that have burgeoned inside your overdeveloped brain; if you can do this then you will all live another day. Speak to them in twitches of your mouth and flicks of your eyes. Touch them until they know the scent of your skin and the callous of your hand and the warmth of your body. Share your food and water with them; trust them to share it back. More will survive that way. The old logic states to seek the heat of a known living thing, to surround it, to let them surround you, because then you will be as a group and then you will be safer and after you can do incredible things. Ask any hard-wired social creature. They all know.

It’s human’s evolutionary pillar of truth, and maybe that’s why, when Sam catches Dean (painfully white except where he’s blossomed red), he holds on so tightly. A small voice inside Sam suggests that the action will help something. An embrace will bring Dean home, it chants. Love can be enough. If we sit together close enough then the dark cannot enter and the predators will hesitate. It’s gotten Sam’s species this far; he can’t feel guilty for trusting it again.

But Sam doesn’t know what happens when the familiar, warm living thing beneath his hands is also the slinking shape just out of sight, the thing that kills. When family become liability instead of security precisely because it is so close. Sam doesn't know what happens, then. He doesn’t want to. Things inside him sob with the desire not to know, but maybe that's part of the evolutionary dance too.

Sometimes it doesn't go right. Sometimes things fail. Sometimes they get it wrong.

 

**ii.**

Castiel stands in the doorway and his stare is a physical weight. Sam wonders whether Castiel already suspected, but didn’t trust himself until Sam voiced it. Dean’s tread hasn’t even faded yet; Sam should have waited longer in case he heard. But Sam’s mouth is already sore from keeping the cutting words inside, and Castiel is standing there and he is listening.

Sam turns in his chair enough to see the edge of Castiel’s coat. Castiel’s head is tilted and his eyes have turned down at their corners with such weight. Sam imagines that he reflects the same weight somewhere in his shoulders and the bend of his neck. They share it, the two of them. Pass it back and forth over phone lines and in glances and touches to shoulders and arms. Sam thinks that the weight has suddenly doubled, and he doesn’t know whether they are strong enough anymore.

Castiel comes to him in a few short steps. He cups the back of Sam’s head and presses it to his hip. Sam falls into the coat material—cold and sharp-smelling—and lets Castiel’s hands roam his hair in short, light strokes.

Find the living things you can trust and surround them and let them surround you. Share the burdens and the boons. Castiel has learned it well. He’s practically fluent.

 

**iii.**

Dean is asleep when Sam enters the room. No, he’s not. He’s pretending, but he’s also shaking so much that the farce is painful. Sam sheds his outer shirt and leaves himself with soft cotton. He slides in so that he faces Dean and, after a perfunctory press of lips to the hairline, can set his chin on the top of Dean’s head. Dean’s breath is hot, shaky, sour against Sam’s collarbone. Sam hooks an arm over Dean’s shoulder, then shifts his gaze when the door opens a second time, and Castiel enters. Castiel undergoes a similar ritual; discards the coat and the tie. He slides in behind Dean, rests his lips on the back of Dean’s neck, and fixes his gaze on Sam. Dean starts to shake harder. Sam suspects that he wants to tell them to go but doesn’t dare speak.

Dean always believed in the old social animal logic most faithfully: trust family, share and protect. That had been his religion. Sam sees a special tragedy in Dean being the one to shatter the old logic so violently. Now, here they are. Sam and Castiel bracketing the thing that would kill them, that they also call friend and brother and thus what they will not leave. Mobius strips of desires and consequences.

Sam finds Castiel’s hand, cold and thin, somewhere over Dean’s shoulder blade. Dean keeps shaking. Sam and Castiel clasp hands and keep their eyes on one another. Like a mutual agreement at the futility and also the inevitability of what they’re doing. Embraces and body heat don’t save anyone anymore; things have progressed beyond open grasslands. But the instincts telling Sam to try have been written inside his cells for thousands of generations, and Castiel is a thorough enough student of that text that he’s been swallowed up by the faith.

They can’t do anything except stay. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe the old logic stands.


End file.
